There's what's eating him, Bickel thought. He's obviously the one charged with seeing we don't loose a killer machine in the universe. Homeostasis for a race can be different from the balance needed to keep an individual alive. But we're isolated out here - an entire race in a test tube.
"We're talking about creating a machine with a specific quality," Flattery said. "It has to operate itself from the inside, by probability. We can't determine everything it's going to do." He raised a hand as Bickel started to speak.
"But we can determine some of its emotions. What if it actually cares about us? What if it admires and loves us?"
Bickel stared at him. That was an audacious idea - completely in keeping with Flattery's function as chaplain, colored by his psychiatric training, and protective of the race as a whole.
"Think of consciousness as a behavior pattern," Flattery said. "What has contributed to the development of this pattern? If we go back..."
His voice was drowned in the klaxon blare of the emergency warning.
They all felt the ship lurch and the immediate weightlessness as the caged fail-safe switch disconnected the grav system.
Bickel drifted toward the forward end of the shop, caught a stanchion, swung himself around and kicked off toward the Com-central hatch, where he dislodged his lock. He went through the hatch in the same fluid motion of opening it, hurled himself toward his couch. He locked in, swept his gaze across his repeaters. Tim and Flattery were right behind.
Prudence was making only minimal corrections on the big console, studying the drain gauges.
Bickel saw that the computer was drawing almost eighty percent of its power capacity, began checking for fire and shorts. He heard cocoon triggers snap as Flattery and Timberlake took their places.
"Computer drain," Timberlake said.
"Radiation bleed-off in Stores Four," Prudence said, her voice hoarse. "Steady rise in temperature back of the second hull bulkheads - no; it's beginning to level off."
She programmed for a hull-security check, watched the sensor telltales.
Bickel, looking over her shoulder at the big board, saw the implications of the flickering lights as soon as she did. "We've lost a section of outer shielding."
"And hull," she said.
Bickel lay back, keyed the repeater screen for monitoring the sensors, began an analysis outward into the indicated area. "You watch the board; I'll make the check."
Images flickered on and out in the little screen at the corner of his board as he keyed it to new sensors farther and father out. Halfway through Stores Four, he was staring into the star-sequined darkness of open space. The sensor eyes revealed foam coagulant flowing into a wide, oval hole from the hull-security automatics.
Out of the corner of his eye, Bickel saw Flattery running a micro-survey along the edge of the break in the hull. "It's as though it were sliced off with a knife," he said. "Smooth and even."
"Meteorite?" Timberlake asked. He looked up from a check of the hyb tanks.
"There's no fusing at the edge or evidence of friction heat," Flattery said. He took his hands off his board, thinking of the island in Puget Sound - the wild destruction in the surrounding countryside. Rogue consciousness. Has it started already?
"What could make that cut through the outer shielding and hull without heating them at least to half-sun?" Bickel asked.
No one answered.
Bickel looked at Flattery, seeing the white, drawn look of the man's mouth, thought: He knows!
"Raj, what could do that?"
Flattery shook his head.
Bickel took a reading on the laser-pulsed timelog off his own repeaters, extracted a position assessment, noted transmission-delay time to UMB, swung his transmitter to his side and keyed it for AAT coding.
"What're you doing?" Flattery asked.
"This we'd better report," Bickel said. He began cutting the tape.
"How about some gravity?" Timberlake asked. He looked at Prudence.
"System reads functional," she said. "I'll try it." She thumbed the reset.
The ship's normal quarter gravity pulled at them.
Timberlake unlocked his cocoon, stepped out to the deck.
"Where're you going?" Prudence asked.
"I'm going out and have a look," Timberlake said. "Some force takes a slice off our hull without crisping the area or spreading a shatter pattern? There is no such force. This I've got to see."
"Stay right where you are," Bickel said. "There could be loose cargo out there... anything."
Timberlake thought of lovely Maida crushed by runaway cargo. He swallowed.
"What's to prevent it slicing us neatly right down the middle, next time?" Prudence asked.
"What's our speed, Prue?" Timberlake asked.
"C over one five two seven and holding."
"Did... whatever it was slow us at all?" Flattery asked.
Prudence ran the back check on the comparison log. "No."
Timberlake took a deep, quavering breath. "A virtually zero-impact phenomenon with a force effect of... what? Infinity?" He shook his head. "There's no kinetic equivalent."
Bickel tripped the transmission switch, waited for the interlock, looked at Timberlake. "Did the universe begin with Gamow's 'big bang' or are we in the middle of Hoyle's continuous creation? What if they're both..."
"That's just a mathematical game," Prudence said. "Oh, I know: the union of infinite mass and finite source can be accomplished by postulating zero impact - infinite force, but it's still just a mathematical game, a canceling-out exercise. It doesn't prove anything."
"It proves the original power of Genesis," Flattery whispered.
"Oh, Raj, you're at it again," Prudence remonstrated, "trying to twist mathematics to prove the existence of God."
"God took a swipe at us?" Timberlake asked. "Is that what you're saying, Raj?"
"You know better than to take that attitude - under these circumstances," Flattery retorted. When they get that message at UMB, they'll know we've achieved the stage of rogue consciousness. There's no other answer.
"You were going to make a guess, Bick," Timberlake said.
Bickel watched the signal timer creep around its circle. It had a long way to go yet before giving them the blip that would tell them the message had enough time to reach its mark.
"Maybe some kind of interface phenomenon that exists only out here in the trans-Saturnian area," Bickel said. "A field effect, maybe, from pressure waves originating in the solar convection zone. The universe contains a hell of a lot of oscillatory motion. Maybe we've hit a new combination."
"Is that what you suggested to UMB?" Flattery asked.
"Yes."
"What if it isn't a mathematical game?" Timberlake asked. "Could we program for a probability curve to predict the limits of such a hypothetical phenomenon?"
Bickel lifted his hands from the AAT keyboard, considered Timberlake's question.
Such a program could be figured in matrix functions, he felt. It was something like their hunt for the Consciousness Factor - trying to trace an exceedingly complex system on the basis of scant data. They could approach it through stacks of linear simultaneous equations, each defining parallel hyperplanes in n-dimensional space.
"What about that, Prue?" he asked.
She saw where Bickel's imagination had led them, and took a trial run in her mind, visualizing the diagonal entries when they appeared as coefficients of the simultaneous equations.
The entire process was over in seconds, but she held herself to silence, savoring the experience. It was a new one. She had set up a programming simulation in her mind, checked it out and filed the results in memory, recalling the bits precisely where she needed them. It was a feat of which she had never thought herself capable. Her own mind... a computer.